Final Project:
Cultural Conflict
(Ethnocentrism)
Liska Fitria R. / 008201500061 / – Wednesday (Feb,17th 2016) 02.00 p.m
Study Programme: Accounting
Lecturer: Mr. Berthy Barnabas
President University
Jababeka Education Park
Jalan Ki Hajar Dewantara, Kota Jababeka-Cikarang Baru 17550
Website: www.president.ac.id – Email: enrollment@president.ac.id
Bekasi – Indonesia
2016
CULTURAL CONFLICT
I. INTRODUCTION
Presumption that we have a planning to visit a part of the world which we
know very little except that it is quite different from our own country. We are
sophisticated enough to expect that the spoken language and probably some gestures
must be different. Then we know that customs will be different, but we are not sure
exactly what this will mean. At least there will be interesting thing that we do. Such
as taking pictures or writing home about. Then the climate and food will be different
of course, but these differences are attractions and are not really problems. This must
be tourist’s view about foreign culture.
Start from the moment when we arrive, our (cultural and personal)
background also will influence everything we expect (and) a great deal of what we do
and do not do. Most of the people we meet will be similarly influenced by their own
backgrounds, culturally, socially, and personally. If some of the people we meet think
we act a little bit strangely, they may never know whether we are peculiar, or whether
most people from our country are strange, or whether all foreigners are strange. Most
of what we do (in a foreign country) will be “what comes naturally”-which means
what we have always done or seen others do back home. Most of our behavior is
outside of our awareness so that “normal behavior” means behavior according to
norms of our culture and not what is done everywhere or done “naturally.” Still, to
extend that we are aware possibilities of different behavior in the land we are visiting.
We may be unusually self-conscious of some or this known as “normal behavior”.
II. BODY – ETHNOCENTRISM AS ONE OF THE CULTURAL CONFLICT
A. Ethnocentrism
1. Definition
Ethnocentrism is a notion not widely used in the early twenty-
first century. Coined by William Graham Sumner in the early twentieth
century, the term owes what conceptual life it has to the likes of
anthropology and intercultural communication. Dominant strains of
these disciplines, especially anthropology, have examined the lives and
cultural expressions of ethnically defined or identified groups and the
misinterpretations resulting from Western perspectives.
Ethnocentrism can be understood as the disposition to read the
rest of the world, those of different cultural traditions, from inside the
conceptual scheme of one’s own ethno cultural group. The ethnocentric
attitude assumes that one’s own ethnic Weltanschauung (worldview) is
the only one from which other customs, practices, and habits can be
understood and judged. Ethnocentrism thus is conceived critically as
involving overgeneralizations about cultures and their inhabitants,
others’ or one’s own, on the basis of limited or skewed, if any,
evidence. So the notion of ethnocentrism is conceived as a profound
failure to understand other conceptual schemes, and, by extension,
practices, habits, expressions, and articulations of others on their own
terms. Standing inside our own conceptual schemes, we are blinded
even to the possibilities of other ways of thinking, seeing,
understanding, and interpreting the world, of being and belonging—in
short, other ways of world making.
It would seem to follow, as many definitions in fact insist, that
ethnocentrism is a claim about the superiority of one’s own culture or
ethnic standing. While this is perhaps a strong presumption in many
ethnocentric claims, we should be careful not to make it definitional
so. One can imagine claims of inherent and inescapably culture-bound
judgments about ethnically ascribed others, about inherent differences,
without assumption or assertion of cultural superiority. If there is any
coherence to the concept, “differentials’ ethnocentrism” must factor
into any working definition of the term as well.
As an analytic concept, ethnocentrism took hold only in the late
1960s and 1970s, and the word did not appear in authoritative
dictionaries until the mid-1970s. The reasons are not unrelated to the
conceptual history of the term racism. While invocation of the notion
of “race” in regard to human beings (and by extension, discussion of
racism) became a taboo subject in Europe in the wake of the
Holocaust, concerns around racism, socially and analytically, emerged
forcefully in the United States. The anthropological concern with
culture turned increasingly to the language of ethnicity, reinforced by
the emergent hold of area studies and liberal distribution of
development aid as an arm of geostrategic politics in the face of
colonial liberation and the Cold War. The romance with ethnicity
seemed more respectful than the legacy of race, its faux universalism
enabling an easy evasiveness. At the same time, the concept of
ethnocentrism—largely descriptive and individualist in analytic
